11.16.2013

Last August in Annandale-on-Hudson at Bard College, I heard poet Karen Lepri read a piece on two 2012 exhibits in New York by artists Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Nan Goldin. I enjoyed the swerves the writing makes and I asked her to share it with xpoetics, and she has.

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Karen Lepri

No Cock Sorry

There
are no cocks—sorry—male members—visible in the three pieces from PS 1’s Thomas
Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk showcased on the museum’s website, but walking through the exhibition feels
like the inverse of Where’s Waldo—he’s/his is everywhere though unlikely to
show up had I photographed the work, the rainbow glare of foil in every hue,
the dominant tinge of all-over gold, and the almost pointillist fanaticism and
fibrous, microscopic details washing out—or shall I say, tenderizing—the hundreds of cut-up black and white male nudes.

My
mother always counseled, No one will even
notice!, when two shades of black were“off” from each other, or when I was the only girl at First Holy Communion
wearing vestment and tights with rubber-soled white sandals (as opposed to
white patent leather Mary Janes), but in the photograph with my skewed smile I
still notice.

In
Goldin’s retrospective Scopophilia at
Matthew Marks last Fall, the photographs of Classical sculptures and
Renaissance paintings of female nudes acted as our tour guides to the irreverent
or simply luscious moments within a gaze of the total work—here fingers pinch a
nipple, hair dangles between breasts, stone returns to painted surface returns
to flesh—Medusa’s stare reversed.

Is my
attraction a form of penis-phobia (it’s
so small—how do I find it?) or does every viewer’s eye lynch onto the
protruding form, its muddled shadows, assured epicenter of every male nude
photo collaged into one of Lanigan-Schmidt’s pieces?

*

My
friend tells me how a boy on the playground tells her daughter, You must like princesses because you’re a
girl, to which she replies, lying, No
I don’t, to which he retorts, scientifically, Then you’re not a girl,to
which she rebuts, plainly, and in my opinion unknowingly losing the battle, Some girls play with boys’ things and some
boys play with girls’ things.

A key
difference between the photograph of the painting detail on the left and the
photograph of “real women” on the right in Goldin’s 2010 The Nap is that in the painting detail photo we can’t see the women’s
hands, can’t see how they sleep or play.

*

“Lesbian
bed-death” is where a non-incestuous sexual relationship between two women, or lesbians, transforms into a potentially
incestuous non-sexual relationship through meta-physical, not physical, bonds—or
so I have heard.

There
is nothing to dramatize about the cruelty of ceasing to desire the body of your
lover or your sister before it even barely begins to die, meaning the desire, meaning
unlike Oedipus and Jocasta or Claudius and Gertrude, Gertrude being not a sister
but by marriage, still wrong enough, or simply fast enough, to pulverize Hamlet’s mind.

*

In The Nap, the paired couples seem joined
at the legs, one body with four torsos, four heads, diametrically positioned,
the thigh of each bottom figure rising to meet at the juncture of two frames,
the left-hand arms peeling away to expose four breasts, the huddled right-hand arms
forming an ‘X,’ a literal coat of arms.

After
Lanigan-Schmidt, my two friends, boyfriends for five
years plus, and I are finishing our “snacks” at the museum restaurant when a
waitress drops a glass that shatters everywhere, and Paul, ever a comic, throws
a wine bottle to the ground, catching it on the bounce, the embarrassed
waitress now smiling, glad to be doubled, her blooper refracted back to her as
if to say, Yeah, we noticed, but nobody
cares.

November 27, 2012Karen Lepri is the author
of Incidents of
Scattering (Noemi, 2013) and the chapbook Fig. I (Horse Less Press, 2012). Lepri
received the 2012 Noemi Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in 6x6, Boston
Review,Chicago
Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, Mandorla, and elsewhere. She teaches
writing at Queens College.

11.10.2013

As noted previously on this blog, Small Press Traffic's Reading Series this Fall has been curated by SPT Board Members. I curated November 3rd's event, a poetry reading and talk by literary and cultural critic, and poet, Fred Moten, and hosted two reading groups for which we read sections of Moten and Stefano Harney's The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions); one of the reading groups happened in Oakland at the Bay Area Public School and one at the Artists' Television Access in San Francisco. Many thanks to the wonderful participants who made the discussions rich and engaged.Small Press Traffic collaborated with Steve Dickison at The Poetry Center, and also with the Bay Area Public School to bring Fred to the Bay Area.On Saturday, November 2nd, Fred spent a couple of hours talking with folks at the Public School. I understand the conversation at this event entailed an exploration of Moten and Harney's work around the university and the undercommons and the work of the Bay Area Public School. Fred said he was interested in learning about what the Public School is up to. Someone estimated that there were about 50 people at this event. After this talk, Fred went with his friend Linda Norton to go see Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave which had just opened in the Bay Area.

On Sunday morning Fred apparently got up and started writing about 12 Years A Slave; he opened his talk with his very recent response to McQueen's film via a tweet that Tavia Nyong'o at NYU had made in response to the film. While the promise of this tweet got me to finally sign up on twitter, the quote itself is a mystery. I can't find it. I think Nyong'o said that this film would change the conversation and he might have made a claim about "black planetary consciousness." Much has been made by many critics of the fact that McQueen is British; many asserting that this film could not be made by Americans. I believe Moten suggested that Nyong'o also made such a claim. Moten took on Nyong'o and outlined what he sees as 5 unspoken formulations implicit in Nyong'o's response. All of these, I believe, had at their center, shame as a modality. In brief, I can tell you that Moten hated this film. He sees it as portraying the black American worker as incapable of representing herself. The slaves in this film, those born into slavery, are depicted as too degraded to know they are degraded. He said the film works to make Solomon Northup a bourgeois subject like you. Moten also suggested that in the film, if you see degradation, you can't enact or embody it. It must be seen in an other and disavowed.The film constructs Northup's complete degradation in the moment he participates in black music, abandoning his violin and joining in the singing of Roll Jordan Roll. This discussion had implications for the field of Black Studies. But I cannot trust my notes, composed while I tried to focus on the flight of Fred's journey, and serve as my own secretary simultaneously. This link is complex and we'll have to refer to Fred's current and forthcoming work to begin to take it apart.I hope to read Fred's thinking on 12 Years a Slave somewhere soon. Bridging his talk on McQueen's film by way of the undercommons, which Moten argues, is not ashamed, Fred then read some poems from his forthcoming The Feel Trio, after Cecil Taylor. He read a bunch of the lyrics that comprise "Black Chapel," and then a series of other work, including some from B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010)Here's one Fred read that's been published elsewhere on the Gramsci Monument website for Thomas Hirschhorn's project at Forest Houses, The Bronx in New York:http://www.gramsci-monument.com/page24.htmlThe Gramsci Monumentif the projects become a project from outside then the projects been a project forever. held inthe projects we’re the project they stole. we stealthe project back and try to give it back to them.come on, come get some of this project. we protect the project with our hands. the architect is in mining and we dispossess him. we protect the project by handing.let’s bust the project up. let’s love the project. can theprojects be loved? we love the projects. let’s movethe projects. we project the projects. I’m justprojecting. the project’s mine to give away. I’m notin mining when I dispossess me. I’m justa projection. projecting is just us, that’s who we are, that’s who we be. we always be projecting. that’s allwe have. we project the outside that’s inside us.we the outside that violates our block. we violate the auctionblock experiment. we pirates of ourselves and others. we arethe friend of all. we are the cargo. are you my treasure?you’re all I need. are you my wish? come be my sunship. I dream the sailsof the project from the eastern shore. plywood sails the cityisland past the enclave mirror so the bricks can fly.at the fugitive bar the food be tasting good. kitchenette’smy cabin. flesh is burning in the hold. I love the wayyou smell. your cry enjoys me. let me taste the way you think.let’s do this one more time. the project repeats me. I am repleatwith the project. your difference folds me in cadillac arms.my oracle with sweets, be my confection engine. tell mehow to choose. tell me how to choose the project I have chosen. are you the projects I choose? you are the project I choose.FM, 8.14.13All in all, it was an awesome evening. Here's the intro I delivered, followed by a tribute to Fred by Steve Dickison.****************************************************Fred Moten Introduction for the Small Press Traffic/Poetry Center Nov 3rd
,2013 Event
Robin Tremblay-McGaw

I’m a late-comer to the work of Fred Moten. I
discovered his work three or four years ago in the company of poets who teach
in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. David Buuck, Erica
kaufman, Simone White, Emily Abendroth, Tonya Foster, and others. We read and
taught some of the poems from Fred’s 2010 book B Jenkins. We read Barbara lee [the
poetics of political form], [statement in opposition] and [the unacknowledged
legislator].

In August of 2012 Fred gave one of the rostrum
lectures at Bard. His talk was called “The Touring Machine: Flesh Thought
Inside Out.” You can google it and watch it online at vimeo. As he began his
talk, the technicians in the auditorium had some trouble with the sound system.
When he returned to the podium, Fred remarked on the productivity of interruptions
and invited students to break in and
ask questions or make comments. And they did.

I have been moved and my thinking about poetry and
black radicalismenriched and made more
complex in reading Fred’s book In the
Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. This is a powerful
book; the reader can’t help but be thrilled as Moten contests Marx’s assertion
that the commodity can’t speak. He reminds us that Marx was living during the
practice of slavery, during, as Moten writes, “the historical reality of
commodities who spoke—of laborers who were commodities before, as it were, the abstraction
of labor power from their bodies” (6).

In
the Break is also a difficult book, one that requires labor,
and struggle to keep up with its brilliant asymptotic flight. And when Fred was
speaking to new undergraduates at Bard that summer in August, I think we were
all going to be challenged to keep up with him. And then students interrupted
him and the talk took a social turn,
became a conversation, a being with one
another.

Somehow Fred pulled off this high wire act keeping
the discourse complex but meeting the audience where they were. I left that
talk in awe of Fred Moten and gave the first person I saw—who happened to be
Eirik Steinhoff—a big hug. I don’t go to church, but I felt like I had been in
one. Maybe what I and others experienced
in that auditorium was in Moten and Stefano Harney’s words: “a touch, a feel
you want more of, which releases you” (Undercommons 99). Call it the church
of the break, the John Coltrane, the B Jenkins, the Fred Moten church.

In [the unacknowledged legislator] from Moten’s
2010 book B Jenkins, he writes:

According to Shelley, poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world. Let’s say the world is a zone from and within which
life is constantly escaping. Poets sing the form of that endless running, that
ongoing running on, always busting out of the sentence or cutting
being-sentenced; but those broken songs, even in their incessant breaking away,
cannot but bear the heavy burden of being-held. At stake, here, is a complex of
weighted departure, of flight in seizure, of an emergent statelessness
submerged beneath the state of emergency. There’s always a trace on the ones
who want to go. Nevertheless, unacknowledged legislators sing diversion out of
turn. They instigate small passages. Their envois strive to more than
correspond (86).

I read this passage as a description of Fred
Moten’s own poetics. The language is seductive and beautiful but it also marks
not the historical only, though it does that, but also the ongoing sentencing,
breaking, and seizures of many who are poor or black or women or queer or
illegal, all of us living in this broken world.

Inviting us to study and plan with one another,
Moten points to the embarkation we
can make in the here and now, a fugitive
run across the territories of self, sound, property, spectacle, politics.
On the way we might do some stuff together in common. “Poetry,” Moten
writes,“investigates new ways for
people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret” (86).

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait. Let’s
welcome Fred Moten.************************************************"Tribute to Fred" by Steve Dickison

“The commons is a ruin, an abbey, with a concert in the
middle.” (“code & tone”)

“the phonograph is also a photograph of movement and what it
bears” (“b jenkins”)

it’s in the way the running of the Birdhouse got passed on
to you from Tip, of Tip’s Tavern, “because all of our families was together.
Hamid’s mother, my mother, my aunt, my aunt by marriage, all of us was right in
there together” and you renaming it into perpetuity the Velvet Lounge, torn
into place against agenda house of the music

“you gotta get to a point where your worst playing can be good” (Fred Anderson)

“most of us can’t afford the diaspora”(“roebuck pearl”)

how you and Diedre Murray rolled together, the littler flowering
sounds over on top of and all up in the weave of the bigger tones, of the booms, two monsters met up pizzicato at
the corner with the ghost of Ronnie Boykins, with the ghost of Wilbur Little, until
the bows getting dragged over at the rainbow chorus enter names in the registry
at church, pulling down the air out of the air into the room (Fred Hopkins)

where they exercised

“the hopes and promise

of
paradise”(“hughson’s tavern”)

at the juncture where Como, Mississippi Fred “I Do Not Play
No Rock ’n ’ Roll” McDowell (Capitol, 1969)

meets Kingsland, Arkansas Fred “all the house is curved, all
the sisters work at sonic, everybody talk like this” Moten (Pressed Wafer,
2000)

in a firehouse

“like someone sanded the box of your voice

like a brass button” (“Cubie and Mt. Tabor,” Arkansas)

Fred “America is false to the past, false to the
present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future”Douglass
feels his way around the drumkit, tightening the heads on the floor-tom,
loosening a snare, patting the skin with his palm and leans

one ear in close, there being drummers like to
tune the pots to fourths & fifths, Elvin say “to construct unlimited tone
combinations, using the dynamic intensity of stroke and whatnot,” or à la Ed
Blackwell’s ear, à la Denis Charles’s, who type out little

tunes, e.g., can render “Thelonious” the melody, these alongside those
who’d say with Max “I tune them to sound as alive as possible. If all of
them sound the same, it’s alright with me, as long as they have life and
resonance,” who withKlook “Before

the war it was only called that music they’re playing up at
Minton’s” hear Art Blakey

say “I don’t tune them. The Africans don’t tune their drums,
and they beat the shit out of them. They sound good, the human being doesn’t
care how technical you are.”

(Art Taylor, Notes and Tones)

“having identified the shit, the shit you can’t say shit
about, that’s all

I can say about that” (“arthur jafa and greg tate” in b jenkins)

“the history of the music is also the history of

rum and coca cola. I’m so glad I ran into you.” (“bebop” in hughson’s tavern)